🎙️ EP 359: StepFun Unveils Step 5 Preview MoE & Alibaba Open-Sources Qwen-Image-2.1

AI Fire Daily · Sep 21, 2026 · 17m · transcript

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Shanghai-based AI startup StepFun released Step 5 Preview, a 600B-parameter sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that activates just 27B parameters per token to deliver frontier coding and financial reasoning performance at $1 per million input tokens. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud expanded its open-weights lineup with Qwen-Image-2.1, a 7B unified architecture capable of simultaneous native generation and layer-based editing with RGBA transparent background support.

We’ll talk about:

A 600B…